The research team of the Public University of Navarre (Basque Country), under the supervision of professor Ramon Gonzalo Garcia of the department of Electric and Electronic Engineering, is participating in a project of the European Space Agency. The final objective is the design of a camera that, working in the range of millimetric frequencies, will be able to obtain images send by different bodies, for example, stars.
The project named “Photonic antenna front-ends: Photonic crystals: Mater
Just as matter can be converted into energy, so too can energy become matter. That’s what five-dozen Jefferson Lab researchers were counting on for an experiment in Hall A
Albert Einstein figured it out by 1905, as he was formulating his special theory of relativity: while you can’t exactly get something from nothing, you can come close. His famous formula, E=MC 2 , works both ways. Just as matter can be converted into energy, so too can energy become matter.
That’s
Astronomers have been puzzled for decades as to how the rings of hot gas surrounding certain types of star are formed. Now a team of scientists from the Universities of Glasgow and Wisconsin believe they have found the answer. The team studied a type of young, hot star, known as a “Be star”, that has a disk of glowing gas around it, similar to the rings surrounding Saturn. Until now, no one has been able to account for how these rings form but in a paper published this month*, the team suggest an ans
Using a technique based on the work of the 1902 Nobel Prizewinner, Pieter Zeeman, an international team of astronomers have, for the first time, provided conclusive proof that the magnetic field close to a number of aging stars is 10 to 100 times stronger than that of our own Sun. These observations suggest a solution to the long outstanding problem as to how, at the end of their lives, a perfectly spherical star can give rise to the complex and often far from spherical structure seen in the resultin
VLT UVES Observes Most Metal-Deficient Star Known [1]
A faint star in the southern Milky Way, designated HE 0107-5240, has been found to consist virtually only of hydrogen and helium. It has the lowest abundance of heavier elements ever observed, only 1/200,000 of that of the Sun – 20 times less than the previous record-holding star.
This is the result of a major ongoing research project by an international team of astronomers [2] . It is based on a decade-lon
Researchers have found that a portion of anomalous cosmic rays — charged particles accelerated to enormous energies by the solar wind — results from interactions with dust grains from a belt of comet-sized objects near Pluto’s orbit. These objects make up what is known as the Kuiper Belt, a remnant of the formation of the solar system.
“This novel finding shows how dust in the cosmos may play an important role for producing the most energetic particles known,” says Dr. Nathan S
Physicists have devised a new experiment that will be used in the quest for exotic forces in nature and “additional spatial dimensions.”
The researchers have demonstrated an innovative way to measure a phenomenon known as the Casimir effect – findings that also could have implications for the design of microscopic machines that contain tiny parts on the size scale of nanometers – or billionths of a meter.
The scientists are taking their theoretical findings a step further by
In search of cosmic mayhem
A physicist at Washington University in St. Louis working with scientists at the Smithsonian Institution is unveiling the dark, violent side of the universe.
Studying the highest energy photons known to science, Washington University Associate Professor of Physics James H. Buckley, Ph.D., and his colleagues are analyzing bursts of gamma rays released from massive black holes at the center of so-called active galaxies.
Using the Whipple Ob
Sometime within the next two years, researchers will detect the first signals of gravity waves — those weak blips from the far edges of the universe passing through our bodies every second. Predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, gravity waves are expected to reveal, ultimately, previously unattainable mysteries of the universe.
Wai-Mo Suen, Ph.D., professor of physics at Washington University in St. Louis is collaborating with researchers nationwide to develop waveform t
The oozing of glacial material in the floating ice shell on Jupiter’s moon Europa has important implications for future exploration of the enigmatic moon and prospects of life in its ice-covered ocean, according to a University of Colorado at Boulder professor.
Robert Pappalardo, an assistant professor in the astrophysical and planetary sciences department and one of the world’s foremost Europa experts, said the icy moon is believed to contain an ocean some 13 miles under its icy
A British physicist has come up with a way to reveal the shifting and shining colours that form in the dark spots where light waves interfere with each other. The patterns await experimental demonstration but computer-generated images are already illuminating new aspects of light that had until now remained in the shadows.
When two waves meet their peaks and troughs interfere. If the peaks are in phase you get a higher peak as the energies of each wave add together, two troughs take away from eac
Astronomers have identified the vivid scar of a cosmic catastrophe: a blue arc thousands of light years long produced when a galaxy pulled in a smaller satellite galaxy and tore it apart.
The streak is composed of clusters of young blue stars that formed as the larger galaxy, Centaurus A, absorbed the smaller galaxy about 200 million to 400 million years ago. Researchers will report in the December Astronomical Journal that their discovery suggests absorption of smaller galaxies may be a sig
Supermassive black holes – the name given to black holes whose mass is more than 1,000,000 times the mass of the sun – can be found at the center of many galaxies. Scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, and several institutions in France have succeeded in tracking a star racing around a dark mass at the center of our galaxy. This achievement offers more support for the widely held view that the dark mass is a supermassive black hole.
An international team of astronomers [2], lead by researchers at the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE), has directly observed an otherwise normal star orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.
Ten years of painstaking measurements have been crowned by a series of unique images obtained by the Adaptive Optics (AO) NAOS-CONICA (NACO) instrument [3] on the 8.2-m VLT YEPUN telescope at the ESO Paranal Observatory. It turns out that earli
A partially exploding star, known as a nova, has recovered more quickly than expected, say scientists who have analysed new data from the ESA`s XMM-Newton X-ray satellite.
Nova explosions are not completely destructive phenomena. In fact, after an explosion occurs, the star recovers and starts shining again. Until now, astronomers have not known how long this process takes. In this case, however, the exploding star recovered in less than three years. This is surprising, given the fact that t
An international team of astronomers today report the discovery of a huge distorted disk of cold dust surrounding Fomalhaut – one of the brightest stars in the sky. The most likely cause of the distortion is the gravitational influence of a Saturn-like planet at a large distance from the star tugging on the disk. This provides some of the strongest evidence so far that Solar Systems similar in size, or even bigger than our own, are likely to exist.
One hundred planets are already known to e
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